Stella Vine was working as a £1,000-a-week soho stripper when she took up painting four years ago, and she remained unknown until Charles Saatchi paid £600 for her dripping-blood portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales. but far from playing the great Brit-art game she is a genuinely tortured artist
In short — or so, at least, I assumed — things had gone brilliantly to plan: thanks to the reflexes of the art-media complex, a nobody who had not lifted a paintbrush until four years ago had become, overnight, a sensation. In this game no one gets hurt, although a few art buyers may get stung.
But the game remains a game only if you know what you are doing and, now that I meet her, I am not at all sure that Vine does.
The first clue that Saatchi’s Midas touch has not turned Stella’s life to gold is her residence, a converted butcher’s shop in a Bohemianised but still working-class street in East London. I say “converted” but I hesitate to say exactly what she has converted it into. Her front door, ajar so that a street seller can keep his stock inside, opens into a scuffed exhibition space, empty today but for a graffiti-covered gas cooker. An oubliette peers down into the dark dungeon quarters of Vine’s 18-year-old son, Jamie. Upstairs festers a beyond-squalid kitchen and farther upstairs — except that this flight has fallen down and been replaced by a ladder — is Vine’s bedroom. On the first floor, where we talk, is her studio: white-painted floorboards, an old mattress, an old cat on the old mattress, a Mac laptop and a chair. This is not cheerful artistic anarchy; it is emotional chaos.
Vine, 35, fair, rustic-skinned, of middle height, buxom in her Tommy T-shirt (overweight, she thinks, were she to return to stripping) joins the cat on the mat. I sit on the chair. She speaks in a regionally indefinite middle-class accent, her introspective confessional featuring sudden bursts of articulacy, learning, anger and distress. I’d guess this vessel of creativity was holed and sinking were the walls of the room not covered with confident paintings from her new show, Prozac and Private Views: a large wood circle containing Catherine Deneuve and smaller rectangles featuring a fleshy Geri Halliwell, Vine’s glamorous Aunt Ella, Denis and Margaret Thatcher, the bolshie Kitten from the latest series of Big Brother and a weeping Ted Hughes. The ailing cooker downstairs is another exhibit, the writing covering it from Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Courting controversy again, I say. Expect letters from the Plath-Hughes estate.
“Yeah, gas cooker. And Sylvia. Yeah,” Vine says, as if for the first time joining the dots of the poet’s suicide. “I don’t know what it is. I have a dark passionate sense of humour, I suppose, but at the same time I could just as easily cry over it as I could sort of be cheeky with it. I suppose I’m quite teenager about it and a bit stubborn.”
Vine thinks herself as much a teenager as her son. She most certainly has an adolescent’s capacity to appropriate the feelings of people with whom she identifies and incapacity to empathise with anyone else. The Whitear controversy is a case in point. Rachel was found dead, clutching a syringe, in her bed-sit in Devon four years ago. Although Vine has not had drug problems herself, Rachel’s image as used in an anti-drugs campaign made a profound impression on her. She had never imagined the resulting painting would be exhibited, let alone the day after police had exhumed Whitear’s body. Yet I discover that she still finds it impossible to grasp the offence that this grisly coincidence caused.
“I think if I met her parents we’d probably get on fine because they’d see that I’m actually quite similar to their daughter really, an artistic destructive person, very simple. She wrote dark poetry about heroin and other things and she was into Nirvana. When you see Rachel on the internet — her eyes, I mean I just think they’re almost my eyes.” Her voice catches as if she will cry. She was prescribed Prozac after her mother’s sudden death from a brain tumour last August. Off it now, and resisting going back on, she frequently sounds self-destructive.
“I always feel very close to the edge of just going. I know a lot of people say that and don’t mean it. But apart from my son . . . ” Her voice goes again . . . “there is nothing at all, really. I always admire the decision that people make in just deciding to end it, even though it’s kind of cruel when you have children and that could ruin their life. But I’m not sure that if you’re a very unhappy person you make an enormous difference by staying, really.”
Doomed females are her subject — Plath, Diana, Whitear — but as she tells me her life story its real stars emerge as the missing, abusive or exploitative males who make victims of women. She was born Melissa Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1969. When she was 3, her father had an affair with the lodger and left home, becoming an unreliable and infrequent figure in her life: not unlikeable but “difficult”, “grumpy” and “miserable”. Oddly, she got on better with his girlfriend, Astrid Jordan — so well that she later changed her surname to Jordan (by my count Vine has got through four names in her short life; even her gallery here trades under a pseudonym, Rosy Wilde).
For a while Stella, her mother Ellenor and older brother Alastair got on well enough in the castle town. When Stella was 7, however, her mother met and married an RAF officer and the family moved to Norwich, where another daughter was born. Stella hated her strict new stepfather, a miser who drew lines on milk bottles to check how much had been drunk when he wasn’t looking. Relations reached a crisis when Ellenor’s longstanding Crohn’s disease developed into bowel cancer. Feeling that she was being blamed by her stepfather for the illness, Stella asked a friend’s mother to foster her. Social services became involved, and acquiesced in her wish to abandon school, and she moved to a bed-sit. There, still under age, she was seduced by the building’s caretaker, ten years her senior.
At the age of 17 she gave birth to Jamie. By now his father was displaying a violent temper and when she moved out into single-parent housing in Norfolk he broke into her flat. So she left for London with Jamie, took a bed-sit in Tooting and enrolled in drama school, finding work on the fringe of fringe theatre and even auditioning for Mike Leigh. She fell in love with a fellow student and lived with him for four years before leaving him for someone else. The new relationship collapsed. Alone again, her acting career going nowhere, aged 26, she began working in strip joints, including the Windmill in Piccadilly.
During the day she was educating Jamie, whom she had removed from school because of bullying. To vary his lessons, in 2000 she took him to painting classes at Hampstead School of Art. It was she, however, who discovered her vocation. Unfortunately, something called Stuckism soon afterwards discovered her.
Formed in 1999 as a backlash to conceptual Brit Art, Stuckism takes its name from an insult tossed at one of its founders, Billy Childish, by his ex-girlfriend Tracey Emin, who said his paintings were “stuck, stuck, stuck”. It champions figurative painting but has its own strict rules. Vine now regards Stuckism as a misogynistic cult but she was impressed enough at the time by the hypnotic charms of its other founder, 48-year-old Charles Thomson. After a two-month romance, they married in New York in August 2001.
“I felt I would never ever amount to anything without him. That’s what he told me,” she says in explanation. The marriage was not a success. Actually, save for a brief reconciliation in London, it ended after a single day in a violent row at their hotel. Vine finally obtained her divorce in October last year. Any relief she felt, however, was short-lived. When the news of Saatchi’s championing of her made headlines this spring, the Stuckists vigorously set about claiming Vine for one of their own. Even now the home page of the interestingly obsessive Stuckist website features carries a huge headline, “THE STUCKIST STELLA VINE”, a tag that she furiously resents and regards as a form of harassment.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler for her simply to acknowledge that they had a minor role and move on. I couldn’t have said anything worse. “‘Just admit it, yeah? ‘How could you possibly have taught yourself to paint? You’re just a blonde stripper’. Regardless of the fact that I’ve lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who’s now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher’s shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing, all this sort of stuff. Regardless of all that, of course, this dynamic man must have taught me to paint.
“I have said in my blogs and in interviews, the people who have inspired me, you know: Sophie Von Hellerman, Anna Bjerger, Paul Housley, Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton. Three or four of those are London artists, younger than me, two of those are big, iconic American painters. I don’t have a problem being generous with who inspires me. If someone inspires me, hats off to them. I’ll sell their work for them. I don’t have a problem with that. But I do have a very, very big problem with someone who saw me coming and exploited me as a mascot.”
I say the Stuckists sound like a playground gang. This upsets her even more. “He’s full of shit and, basically, every time people ask me about this f***ing man, it’s impossible to get my point of view across. You’ve got the school playground and you’ve got some very clever bullies and everyone else goes, ‘Just ignore them’. And then this kid ends up hanging himself.”
I suggest that we change the subject.
In the past few months, she tells me, she has been having an affair. It has ended unhappily. She reckons her lover had not realised what an “aggressive and desperate a person” she was.
I say I am so sorry that success has not made her happier. “No, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? People occasionally ask for your autograph or say, ‘I saw you in the paper’, but that doesn’t mean anything at all.”
So what has Saatchi’s patronage brought? Money? Well, as a stripper she could earn £1,000 a week. Saatchi bought the two original paintings for £600 each. Do, as they say, the maths. But there is no going back to the clubs now because she would live in fear of a punter with a camera-phone selling a picture to a tabloid.
Rich, she is not. On the night of the Saatchi opening she arrived late because she was waiting for the café next door to open so she could borrow £10 for the fare.
Fame, meanwhile, has made her nervous and self-conscious about her art. The dripping blood — originally an accident of the thin paint she uses — has become a trademark in a way that she never intended. Nor has she become accepted into the YBA/Jay Jopling/Charles Saatchi set. When Charles and Nigella came to inspect her work, she hid upstairs, starstruck. She still has not met them.
“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” she asks. “You get that much attention, it’s bound to affect you a lot and you get really confused and lost.”
She says she feels very alone, wonders if she should take a night class in the hope of meeting someone. Maybe she should. There are some good men out there and she yet may spot one, for, despite everything, she is not a man-hater, rather the reverse. Indeed, when she was stripping she was generous and talkative with even “the real psychos”. Her indulgence towards dependent men — Jamie included — may be, as she says, slightly “warped”, but to ban all men from her life would surely be worse.
There’s other more positive news, I think, and it is revealing itself in her art: she is moving away from painting women exclusively as victims. Two-fingering Kitten, a tarty Deneuve, dignified Thatcher, even fat and happy Ginger Spice, these are positive images. And although Vine is still heavily grieving her mother, they are all living people. No, the last thing she should do now is give up and run off to Spain.
Perhaps, I suggest, I have seen her on a bad day. “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll be high as a kite, probably, really cocky and confident. ‘I’m putting a show on here. I’m the best thing since sliced bread’. I mean too extreme really, really irritating. No, don’t worry about me.”
And so I’ll try not to, but I do wonder if her succès de scandale does not point to another legacy of Brit Art. Thanks to its brutal flippancy, we now automatically imagine artists to be cynical sales persons.
Once upon a time I would not have been surprised to discover a suffering artist.
Prozac and Private Views is at Transition, 110a Lauriston Road, London E9, until July 4.
沒有留言:
張貼留言